Leonard Pitts Jr. stories, Page 5

“He wears the clothes of a dissenter, but there’s a logo on his back.” — from “Damn It, Rose,” by Don Henley. When he died, Martin Luther King was likely the most hated man in America. This is a fact obscured by decades of veneration so intense that even conservatives...

Robert E. Lee has retreated from Richmond. Again. The first time, you will recall, was in April of 1865, when he and his tattered army abandoned the city, fleeing east before finally surrendering at Appomattox Courthouse to federal forces commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. This latest — and, one...

Can we first just say how bizarre it is? Yes, it’s invasive, and hypocritical, too, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But first, let us spare a moment for how purely, intensely and prodigiously strange it is. As you’ve likely heard, Texas’ new anti-abortion law, which the Supreme Court...

It’s been five years since I first speculated in this space about the end of American democracy. In doing so, I felt like a man climbing out on an especially creaky limb. But as hyperpartisanship rose to ever more bizarre extremes, as the misinformation crisis left ever more people babbling...

Many years ago, one of my sons came to me, excited about a promotional offer from some bank. I no longer remember the offer or the bank, but I do remember telling him not to fall for it; I had accepted a similar offer years before, and it cost me...

He said many profound things that day. He said America had given African Americans “a bad check.” He said he had come to remind the nation of “the fierce urgency of now.” He said we might hew “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” He said, “I...

Last week, at least two men fell from a U.S. military plane as it climbed into the skies above Afghanistan. In video taken from the ground, they are so small you almost have to squint to see them. They seem roughly the size of a period, the end to some...

Chris Rock described it as a kind of temper tantrum. This was in 2011. “When I see the tea party and all this stuff,” the comedian told Esquire, “it actually feels like racism’s almost over.” He likened the tea party — with its street theatrics, overwrought histrionics and overt panic...

They told them they had bad blood. What they actually had was syphilis, but the U.S. Public Health Service never shared that diagnosis with the almost 400 African American men, most of them poor and under-educated sharecroppers, they recruited for a secret study at Tuskegee Institute in 1932. Indeed, health...

Let’s talk about the things they will not learn. “They” meaning K-12 students in Tennessee. Not that the Volunteer State is alone in passing laws and standards to restrict the teaching of African American history. To the contrary, a number of states — Oklahoma, Texas, Florida and more — have...

Gunther Hashida killed himself last week. We don’t know why. At this writing, we don’t even know how. What we do know is that Hashida, an 18-year veteran of the D.C. police force, is the fourth cop to die by his own hand after responding to the Jan. 6 insurrection...

We were almost there. That’s the most frustrating thing about the most recent announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that even those who are fully vaccinated against the disease should return to wearing masks indoors in cities that are covid-19 hot spots. It was only two months...

She is 8 years old. That’s … what? About third grade? Too young for boyfriends. Too young for R-rated movies. Too young for algebra or a learner’s permit. But she has already experienced her second shooting. It happened a little over a week ago in Washington, D.C., outside of Nationals...

We live in ignorant times. By now, surely this is obvious beyond argument to anyone who’s been paying attention. From the Capitol insurrectionist who thought he was storming the White House to Sen. Tim Scott’s claim that “woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy” to whatever thing Tucker Carlson...

It was, let us say, an interesting weekend for democracy. Call it a tale of two cities. One is Dallas, where thousands of so-called “conservatives” — the word has less meaning by the day — gathered in support of Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to delegitimize a free and...

Here you go: I have forgotten more about race than most people have ever known. Apologies if that sounds like braggadocio, but there’s a point that needs making. I’ve spent the better part of 40 years researching and writing about the history and dynamics of race in America — and...

For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and 29 seconds have turned into 22½ years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin famously knelt on Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues stood by, indifferent...

I owe a lot to Gary Mahoney. He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California, and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer...

Conservatives have a special purgatory for uppity Black women who dare question America’s founding myths. New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — her Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” centralized slavery in America’s origin story, a heresy that inspired laws banning her work from classrooms — now lives there. And she’s about...

The morning bell rang at Republican High (“Home of the Fightin’ Pachyderms”) as students shuffled in. Gretchen Niedermeyer dry swallowed a couple of pre-emptive aspirins and reminded herself as she did every morning that she was just 16 months and — a glance at the calendar — seven days from...

A few words about the makers and the takers. That, as you may recall, was the formulation once favored by Fox “News” and other organs of the political right to describe the dynamic between those at the top of the economic pyramid and those at the bottom. The poor —...

Dear Sen. Joe Manchin: It has only been 56 years. As Americans, we are pleased to call ourselves one of the world’s oldest democracies. We are actually one of the world’s newest. Democracy, after all, is government shaped by the will of the people. But until 1920, roughly half the...

So what will you do after democracy dies? Who will we be after democracy dies? After democracy dies, will we remember the country we had? Will we remember all that we lost? How will we explain what we allowed to happen? Will we be ashamed after democracy dies? After democracy...

It’s not just Tulsa. From the 2019 premiere of HBO’s “Watchmen,” which introduced many Americans to a racial atrocity they’d never heard of, to all the recent media attention — CNN, the New York Times, NPR — marking this week’s centennial, the Tulsa Race Massacre of May 31 to June...

It’s not every day you interview someone who tells you he wants to kill himself. He was a Vietnam veteran named Greg, a man with haunted eyes and a soft voice filled with the horror of his experience in Southeast Asia: the jungle rot, the lost friends, the children rigged...